Bitcoin Forum

since the mining power increase is ramping up faster than the difficulty adjustments can compensate for, the halving time is now going to be less than 4 years.

anyone know of a website that shows a calculated halving date estimate?

http://bitcoinclock.com/

Kind of boring to watch (even the "second" hand) but the answer to your question is:

Reward-Drop ETA: 2016-09-25 17:14:03 UTC (150 weeks, 6 days, 13 hours, 50 minutes)

as of the time of this writing.

hmmm so the time cut off according to that clock is only 2 months?

so 3 years 10 months instead of 4 years?

doesn't seem to have as much effect as I would have thought (the rapid daily mining power increases)

I also like these charts:

http://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

Especially the second one.  It shows graphically how the difficulty adjustments are calculated.

It will likely go back up if one takes into account the eventual crash of difficulty in a year or two when the most modern ASICs will be out and market will be over saturated and deployment will overshoot profitability.  Unless exchange rate keeps rising then all bets are off.

Once deployed ASICs will keep mining.   Miner may never make a positive return but shutting down will only ensure a larger loss.  If difficulty reaches or exceeds break even efficiency (electricial cost = value of BTC mined) then new hardware sales will die off but existing units will remain online.

Unless the exchange drops 75%+ I wouldn't expect to see a major drop in difficulty.

Not true - at some point existing units use too much electricity and value of new BTC mined cannot cover the cost (past efficiency is irrelevant).

Well miners can always choose to sell off the ASICs if the expected return over the lifetime is less then the selling price....

But, in order to sell their equipment they would have to believe that the loss they are taking on the sale (it will be a loss) is less than the loss they would take if they continue to mine.

This is a difficult calculation to make and a bitter pill to swallow.

Also, they have to find someone willing to buy their outdated hardware.

That won't be for a while even assuming no price increase.  Even still as the oldest least efficient becomes obsolete it will be resold to those with cheaper power and when it finally goes offline there will still be newer more efficient gear coming online.  net-net you may see the hashrate stall but a sustained down trend?  Not likely.

Which doesn't reduce the hashrate, it just changes the owner.

I guess the only way for the hashrate to reduce is the machine kaBOOM...

Thanks, didn't know we have such thing... guess I am going to buy more bitcoin before it go halve...

Now many blogs and posts on the web are saying to Buy the coins instead of investing on the miners.  Others are saying the mining machine makers are making sweet profit while the miners are not getting their ROI.

I should have listened to those advice.  The coin went up from 220's to 250's in just 1 day